West African cotton: economic weight and dependence

West African cotton is a farming success that has yet to become an industrial one. The CFA franc zone is the world's second-largest exporter of fibre, it produced more than 2.6 million tonnes of seed cotton in 2023-2024, and yet it transforms almost nothing: around 98 percent of the region's fibre leaves raw for Asian spinning mills. The real question, then, is not who, Mali or Benin, produces the most tonnes. It is why an entire region lets the value slip away, and what that choice costs when world prices fall for four seasons in a row.

An economic pillar, between 3 and 15 percent of GDP

In the main cotton-growing countries of West and Central Africa (Benin, Mali, Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Cameroon), cotton accounts for between 3 and 15 percent of GDP. But the macroeconomic figure understates the real social dependence. In Benin, the cotton sector mobilises close to 30 percent of total employment; in Mali, around 17 percent; in Burkina Faso, close to 7 percent. Across Africa's least developed countries, fibre supports more than 3.5 million farming families. Cotton is therefore not one export line among others: it is the backbone of rural incomes, which makes every price shock social before it is budgetary. The region crossed a threshold in 2023-2024 with more than 2.6 million tonnes of seed cotton (up more than 24 percent on the previous season), but rising volumes do not mechanically translate into rising value.

Mali leads in output, Benin leads in value

The 2023-2024 season saw Mali seize the top spot in production with 690,000 tonnes, after a season spent behind Benin. Benin follows with 600,063 tonnes. The production ranking does not tell the whole story, however: it is on export value that the positions reverse.

Value is captured downstream

In 2024, Benin exported USD 525.7 million of cotton, the highest level in West Africa and 12th in the world, even though its output is lower than Mali's. Burkina Faso follows with USD 335.5 million, sharply up year on year. By contrast, Malian exports collapsed from USD 324.7 million in 2023 to 63.0 million in 2024, under the combined effect of security challenges and falling world prices. The top producer by volume, Mali ranks only fifth in the region by value: wealth creation happens downstream (ginning, processing, export logistics) as much as in the field.

The top producer by volume, Mali ranks only fifth by export value: West African cotton is won at the ginning mill as much as in the field.

No fatality: the Cameroon counter-example

Part of the regional debate rests on an implicit assumption: West African yields would be low because climate, soils and producers' means doom them. The comparison with Cameroon disproves this fatalism. In the same 2023-2024 season, West Africa's five main producers achieved an average yield of 0.54 tonnes of seed cotton per hectare, while Cameroon, in a comparable geography, reached 1.54 tonnes per hectare, almost three times as much. The gap therefore does not stem from an agronomic curse but from organisational choices: input quality and availability, technical advisory support, season scheduling, soil fertility management. Where advisory support and logistics keep up, yields take off.

Why the value leaks: anatomy of a shortfall

If cotton wealth partly escapes the region, it is no accident. Three mechanisms compound, each measurable. First mechanism, the processing deficit: around 98 percent of West and Central African fibre leaves raw for Asian spinning mills (Bangladesh, China, the world's main garment workshops), and local processing plateaus at around 1.5 percent of the fibre in French-speaking Africa. The value added by spinning, weaving, garment-making and apparel, that is, the most lucrative part of the chain, is therefore captured off the continent and often re-imported as finished clothing. Second mechanism, the yield deficit: at 0.54 t/ha, each cultivated hectare produces three times less sellable fibre than in neighbouring Cameroon, which dilutes incomes over ever-larger areas and raises the unit cost of production. Third mechanism, dependence on the world price: without processing, the sector's income is entirely indexed to the raw fibre price, which the producer does not control and which is set on distant financial markets. Each of these mechanisms is reversible through targeted policy, but none is corrected by raising volumes alone.

• Processing deficit: ~98 percent of fibre exported raw, ~1.5 percent processed locally; the value added leaves for Asia.
• Yield deficit: 0.54 t/ha against Cameroon's 1.54, almost three times less fibre per hectare.
• World-price dependence: income fully indexed to the raw fibre price, beyond any local control.
• Security vulnerability: in Mali, insecurity cut export earnings by 80 percent in one year, regardless of volumes produced.

The lost-value pool, quantified

The shortfall is no longer a hunch: it has been quantified at the highest level. In March 2026, at a WTO conference on adding value to African cotton, it was estimated that mobilising USD 5 billion in investment and capacity-building support could generate around 500,000 direct jobs and USD 6 billion in value-added products over ten years in the C-4+ countries (Benin, Burkina, Mali, Chad and partners). In other words, African cotton is not too small to justify industrialisation: it is the absence of industrialisation that keeps it small in value. Benin has begun to materialise this pool with the Glo-Djigbé Industrial Zone (GDIZ), whose first phase plans to process 40,000 tonnes of fibre per year in integrated factories (spinning, weaving, garment-making) and which generated around 14,000 direct jobs in 2024. Nationally, those 40,000 tonnes still represent only around a dozen percent of Beninese production, the rest still leaving raw, but it is the first concrete demonstration that part of the chain can be repatriated and that jobs follow. The ten-year trajectory sketched by the WTO sets the order of magnitude of what remains to be won.

The cost of inaction: four seasons of falling prices

As long as the sector remains a raw-material exporter, its income tracks the world price with no buffer. And that price is falling. The Cotlook A index, the international fibre benchmark, fell from 85.80 cents per pound in late September 2024 to 78.90 cents in late December 2024, then to 74.30 cents in late December 2025, its lowest level since October 2020. The US Department of Agriculture expects a fourth consecutive season of decline in 2025-2026. For a region indexed 100 percent to raw fibre, this slide is not a passing event but a structural erosion of earnings. Mali illustrates the extreme scenario: under the combined effect of insecurity and falling prices, export earnings fell by 80 percent in a single year, despite a sharp rise in production. Inaction, here, has a name: watching points of GDP and hundreds of thousands of rural incomes melt away with no lever to protect them.

What national averages hide

The figures in this article, national tonnages, export values, average yields, are essential for framing, but they mask the gaps that actually determine how effective a policy is. A national yield of 0.54 t/ha aggregates high-performing basins and lagging zones; an average does not say where the 20 percent of municipalities dragging output down are, nor why. National export value does not say what share goes to the producer, the ginner or the transporter. And an annual figure does not identify the season window in which a delay in inputs cost ten points of yield. This is precisely where CRAD's angle lies: public decision-making needs fine-grained, disaggregated and geolocated data, not just a national aggregate. Knowing which municipalities are lagging, which links capture the margin, and at which point in the season advisory support pays off best, that is what turns a cotton budget into a measurable gain in yield and value.

A national average of 0.54 t/ha does not say where the lagging municipalities are or which link captures the margin. Decisions need disaggregated data, not an aggregate.

The gender angle: work invisible in the statistics

The cotton sector mobilises female labour on a massive scale, in sowing, weeding, harvesting and sorting, yet this contribution remains largely invisible in official statistics, which mainly count farm heads and marketed volumes. As processing develops, the issue shifts toward industrial employment: at the GDIZ, garment units have been recognised for their promotion of gender equality. Without sex-disaggregated measurement, sector monitoring can neither make visible the value women actually create nor target the policies that would secure their incomes. This is a field where field statistics, a CRAD speciality, directly condition the quality of the decision.

Contrasting production trajectories

Over two seasons, the paths diverge. Benin advances steadily (587.7 then 600.1 thousand tonnes), Mali jumps from 390 to 690 thousand tonnes, while Burkina Faso slips slightly (from 412 to 387.3 thousand tonnes). Yet the spectacular growth in Malian production did not shield the country from the collapse of its export earnings, proof that volumes are not enough in the face of insecurity and price volatility. Volume is a necessary condition, never a sufficient one.

A structural dependence to correct

The sector remains exposed to a triple dependence: on world prices, on security conditions, and on stagnant yields (around 1 tonne of seed cotton per hectare since 2000 in several basins, according to Cahiers Agricultures). States are mobilising resources in response, such as the USD 131.8 million committed by the BOAD to the cotton sectors of Burkina Faso and Mali, mainly geared toward expanding acreage and improving yields. But as long as public money first finances volume rather than processing and resilience, it reproduces the very model that exposes the region. Vertical integration and diversification, the most effective levers for reducing vulnerability, remain insufficiently exploited.

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